Kevin Fisher-paulson

My hair askew with
that lopsided look you get
sleeping in a chair
in a hospital, the copy of Isabel Allende’s Zorro
...

Syringa Vulgaris

In the backyard of our home in Yaphank,
a single lilac grew between the scrub pines,
...

Pacific Coast Highway
Headed North

Down and Up the Hills of Fogtown
...

Yet even in the deepest of night, the dark
is never whole, cannot stop sight. The dark

Is broken in the vacuum by
...

When you asked me about San Francisco,
and who I had become
and what I missed most of the other coast,
...

The social worker took my triplets in a sports sedan,
back to the woman who had broken them.
She would not take the chipped plaster Saint Jude.
...

I flew down to the sky glaciers
when the summer mountains still held snow
when the light limned longer than my solstice
and an eagle circled, searching.
...

In every page I seek his ghost.
I write in a dead man’s journal,
begging to be haunted, to be hunted
by the slipping moonlight.
...

I buried
the puppy in the
blue shade of
spruce sapling
...

While walking through Muir Woods I step upon
an ancient burl. The snap cracks the forest,
then silence. Shadows give way to morning.
A gold-tipped hawk screeches as it wheels beyond
...

'Veni, Vedi, Veci'

Your right hand reaches,
your index finger beseeches
...

The sun sets all ways in the west as the
shadows grow Indigo follows the red
as darkness scratches around the garden,
the lilacs close, the calallilies led
...

Sunday morning, in the fireplace embers,
soot and shards of glass are all that’s left.
On a Saturday night he
twisted the knob on the door of thick wood,
...

Believe the totem.
Embrace the wisdom of the
mother deer staring at you
chewing on grass
...

You skip as a stone across the sea
but come to rest too soon upon the sand.

You changed the earth; you changed the sky.
...

Lazy winds curl round the edges
of an evening in late summer.
Slender crickets chirp of passion
through the grass, down leaves of umber.
...

Since last you whispered in my ear I learned
to sleep
with men.
...

The sun sets all ways in the west as the
shadows grow indigo follows the red
as darkness scratches around the garden,
the lilacs close, the calallilies led
...